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| LOVE LOVE LOVE, these excited-Christmas-morning-waiting-to-see-what-Santa-brought-boys! 2008 |
We all have our stories; threads of experiences that when
woven together make up the cloth of our character. My mother is cut from the
finest weave and part of her story (the cashmere part of her character I
imagine) is a story I can’t remember not knowing. In fact, it’s a story I grew
up loving; one with a sad beginning, one where there is a car accident on a lonely
stretch of desert highway during a dark, dark May night. Two sisters and a brother are hit by a drunk
driver, the details include a head on collision, the sound of metal ripping and
suitcases being ejected from the back of a white pickup truck to land open
halves on the highway; the contents forever lost, ground into the black asphalt,
papery ashes. In this story, one of the
sisters dies and one of the sisters breaks both of her legs and crushes her
pelvis. The sister with the broken legs
is my mother. It's a story I've heard all my life, I know it beginning to end:
After the long ambulance ride to the hospital, the doctor on
call wanted to amputate my mom's legs because they were crushed so badly,
mangled by the impact of a car’s motor ramming into them. (I remember my mom
telling me how she temporarily regained consciousness at the crash site and
thought there was a stick poking out of her leg, so she tried to pull it out,
but it was her tibia). When the drunk driver’s car hit my families, it did so
at an angle; my Aunt Ann, who was sitting by the window, took the brunt of the
force, then my mother, then my Uncle Guy who was driving. Miraculously, an orthopedic surgeon, (a
rarity in rural communities in those days) who had moved to St.George, Utah three
days earlier, was able to save my mom's legs. However, the relief in repair was
tempered with the stern warning that my mother might not ever walk again and
because of the damage to her pelvis and internal organs, would probably never
have children.
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| My mother Ruth Ellis with her delicious and very kissable grandson Aiden Ellis 2013 |
I used to lean against my mom on the couch while she talked,
wondering how it would feel to be in a body cast up to your armpits. Wondering
what it was like to be confined to a wheel chair or a bed with the phone resting on your plaster cast in case
somebody wanted to call and talk to you and you couldn't get up to answer the
phone. In this story, the sad beginning moves on to a sad middle. The middle
part is where my mother tries to learn to live her life without her sister,
which isn't easy. And it's also the part where the numbness of shock and
disbelief wears off like spent Novocain and my mom starts to feel again. This
is the part where she laments over trading spots with her older sister only
moments before they came up on a rise in the road and were greeted by the glare
of headlights rushing straight at them like a freight train; there was no time
to react. They were blinded by the intensity of light. “It was so hot in the
car,” my mom had said, pushing a piece of hair behind my ear. “Ann had sat on
me, until I moved. We were laughing the whole time.” In the middle part my
mother wonders if she'll walk again, she wonders if she'll have children, she
wonders why she's still living while her sister died. But then, towards the
ending of this story, things start looking up a bit. This is the part I always
liked. This is the part that happens at Christmas.
When the weave of my mom’s fabric inexplicably changed from
silk to wool in a flash, she was only twenty. She’d just finished two years of
college, but was stuck at home that fifth semester while her legs healed. In
this ending part, my mother told me how hard it was to be home with her three
brothers; everyone trying to act normal and celebrate like they always did. She
helped decorate the tree from her wheel chair (and in my ever dramatic mind I
imagined her throwing silver icicles on the tree and missing the limb; the icicles
coming apart in mid air and falling lifelessly to the ground). She listened to
carols on the radio and tried not think if her sister Annie was still alive,
she would have been playing the piano and my mom would have been singing. She
said she tried not to think about how they would have slept in the attic
painted purple together, and raced down the steep stairs two at a time to open
presents in the morning. She said, mostly, she just tried to not to think at
all.
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| Logan said he closed his eyes on purpose so he could wish extra hard | ! 2008 |
In this ending part, my mother is still in a wheel chair. And
while her legs are healing, and it's been seven months since the accident, she
still can't walk. She told me, while I snuggled closer, my knees pulled to my
chest, that on Christmas morning she’d sat on the couch in her plaid flannel
nightgown, smiling and opening presents with her brothers. (I always asked her
what she got, but she never remembered). And then, just when she thought there
were no presents left, her dad said, (and this is the part where my mom always
smiled) “There is one more gift for Ruthie.” (And this is the part where I
smiled because I knew what the present was). There against the wall, behind a
sheet, next to the curtains, was a bike, but my mom didn’t know it was a bike
until her dad pulled off the sheet, and she saw it, all shiny, with wide white
handlebars, and the seat with the springs under it. This is the part where my
mom said, “Dad, why did you get me a bike? I can't even walk yet.” And then my
grandpa told her while he stroked her hair, just like my mom stroked mine, “But
you will, Ruthie. You will.”
“See, Joanie,” my mother would explain, “Grandpa had faith
that I would walk again, he had so much hope, that he gave me a bike, before I
could even stand.” And as I leaned
against her safe and warm, I would remember how I learned to ride my bike and
how it felt to have my dad holding the seat, and running behind me. “Christmas,”
my mom would say, “Is all about hope.”
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| Gingerbread house making boys (do you think the sugar is affecting Spencer?) 2008 |
For me, I need hope like I need air, which is why I love
Christmas and the chance it offers to breathe deeply (my boys do look at me
weirdly while I gulp asking, “What are you doing mom? You look strange. Are you
choking? Close your mouth!”). I confess, when struggling through the middle
parts of my life, I have craved the hope synonymous with Christmas even in the
middle of July. And in those dark moments when the weave of my spirit seems to
be coming apart at the seams the lines from “O Holy Night” have played out in
my heart and given me comfort. I know I am a blessed girl, I’ve always known,
but even with all my worldly comforts I sometimes think I might know something
of how those little shepherds may have felt as they bleary eyed watched over
their flock. Like my predecessors, I have longed for, or as the lyrics read, “pining” for “a thrill of hope” and like
the rest of the “weary world” I too have been gratefully overwhelmed when night
has split apart and “yonder breaks a new and glorious morn…”
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| For this picture alone (everyone looking AND smiling) my boys made it on the nice list. Jackson 2011 |
Hope is such a precious commodity. It should
be savored, shared and remembered. I have learned on those nights in mid June
when daylight can’t seem to reach me quick enough; when a thread from my soul
has become caught in the Velcro of my son’s shoes and I find myself unraveling stitch
by stitch, to think of the Christmas bike.
To remember my mother did learn to walk again and that she rode her bike
with the desert sun shining on her the whole time she pedaled. She married my
dad and had five kids. And in those particularly black moments when I've felt
broken and hopeless, I've thought of the Christmas bike and how when I asked my
mom how she learned to walk again, she said, “First I had to learn to crawl.”
